August 15, 2009

This book was written by:Dr. E.S. Williams, who feels that "comprehensive sex education is not only ineffective in achieving its stated objective of reducing sexual tragedies, but that it contributes to the problem"(p.10), encouraging the staging of tragedies like Stiff Hamlet, King Lear Gets Crowned, and Coriol-Anus. Dr. Williams himself is a tragic figure because his work as director of public health for Croydon Health Authority pitted him in a losing battle against the powerful sex education lobby that constantly undermined and perverted the government's efforts.
For example, "[In 1991] the sex education lobby, claiming that AIDS was the largest public health threat of the twentieth century, was being provided with large amounts of money for its ‘safer sex’ propaganda. [....Figures from 2000 show that] the epidemic predicted by the Department of Health proved to be a gross exaggeration"(p.232). The money spent to prevent an AIDS epidemic in the U.K. was completely wasted because "by the end of 1997 it was becoming clear that the threatened AIDS epidemic had fizzled out"(p.238).

What is in this book: This study, which combines the stirring and impassioned rhetoric of an IRS publication, the open-minded tolerance of Draco’s Athenian constitution, and a dedication to footnoting and citation not seen since An Analysis of Section 16 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934*, chronicles shocking facts about sex education efforts in the United Kingdom over the past six decades.
"While [the North Ireland sex education program(me)]Love for Life claims that its purpose is to encourage young people to delay sexual intercourse, it also believes that giving young people information about contraception and sexually transmitted diseases helps them to make an informed choice about whether or not to have sex"(p.17). As horrifying as this sounds, it gets worse. By citing a case where "the Government, using all the powers of mass media, the machinery of official-dom, the propaganda of the sex education lobby and the influence of the medical profession, had won the legal battle to provide contraceptives to children without the knowledge or consent of their parents,"(p.212) Dr. Williams provides irrefutable proof for his claim that "clearly, a key aim of the Government’s teenage sexual health strategy is to ensure that children have easy access to contraceptives and, in case of a slip-up, access to emergency contraception"(p.3-4). And if it wasn’t bad enough that "CARE [Christian Action, Research and Education] teaches that children ought to make sexual decisions on the basis of feelings generated by self esteem, rather than the certainties taught by biblical morality,"(p.291) it turns out that "the IPPF [International Planned Parenthood Federation], the organization set up to promote the ideology of Margaret Sanger, advocates that sex education, family planning and legal abortion should be accepted as human rights"(p.241). Naturally, this must all be stopped.

*Clearly, using footnotes is serious business. Dr. Williams has forgone footnotes in favor of endnotes, but he uses 1,033 of them, at an average of 49 endnotes per chapter, or 3 references per page.

What is not in this book: How-to lessons on quad barebacking, inverse horseplay, or 'the split canoe' (which, in the U.S., is a felony in 32 states). This book manages to report on the lessons in depravity taught to defenseless schoolchildren without going into detailed descriptions. Dr. Williams refrains from duplicating the graphic offenses present in sex education materials because "Christian believers do not indulge in lewd and indecent language. The sex talk promoted by sex education is completely unacceptable"(p.249).
Dr. Williams also notes that "it is not difficult to see the similarity between the Canaanites and the modern day sex educators. Both are amoral, both have deified sex and both are devotees of depraved sexual practices"(p.254), specifically mentioning that people accused the Canaanites of doing detestable things, and "the detestable things included human sacrifice, demonism, homosexuality, lesbianism and incest"(p.253).
Dr. Williams maintains his restrained, sober approach for this subject because "it is vitally important for men, women and children to avoid anything that may arouse sexual lust"(p.262). Despite this self-censorship, the study remains coherent and informative. It describes how "the sex education lobby was raving about [the book] Make it Happy, [but] others were disturbed by the amoral advice that was being given to young people. George Gardiner (MP) said it was enough to make parents’ hair stand on end, and Ronald Butt described it as the filthiest sex education book he had seen"(p.175). When it comes to filthy, we don’t second-guess the opinion of Mr. Butt.

Would you recommend this book to a pack of unruly chavs? Normally, I’d say hell no, slap an ASBO on those hooligans and let prison sort them out. However, the nation’s youth need to learn that they face danger from radicals like Alfred Kinsey, who "vigorously promoted, juggling his figures to do so, a hedonistic, animalistic conception of sexual behaviour, while at the same time he consistently denounced all biblical and conventional conceptions of sexual behaviour"(p.81). "It is clear that Kinsey was not an objective scientist, as he claimed, but a dedicated sex revolutionary,"(p.90) and we cannot let children be subverted by revolutionaries like him or like H.G. Wells, who "was a persistent advocate of an almost completely amoral freedom"(p.67).

Would you recommend this book to Queen Victoria? Yes. Dr. Williams admires the morals of the Victorian era, and her royal highness would agree with his remark that "the woman who displays herself is foolish for she is attracting men for all the wrong reasons"(p.256). She would also want to do something about the ways that sex educators were trying to overcome "the innate, God-given, emotional response of embarrassment that has the function of protecting against sexual indecency"(p.261). In fact, "this is why sex education has developed techniques for overcoming embarrassment [.... so that] sex educators, with their desensitized children, can plummet the depths of depravity in the name of ‘safer sex’"(p.261).
Once that protective embarrassment is out of the way, sexual revolutionaries are "teaching young people in a climate that encourages promiscuity and homosexuality"(p.31) where "boys, in their fantasy life, imagine that girls really do want to have sex"(p.262). This is a terrible thing because "a chivalrous man understands that for a woman there is no such thing as casual sex, for she bears the awful responsibility of conceiving a new life and all that that involves"(p.259).

What was interesting about this book? Teenage pregnancy rates are alarmingly high in the United Kingdom. The Daily Mail—an unbiased news source not given to reactionary conservativism—recently reported on the failure of an experimental sex education program and profiled a girl who had 4 abortions by the age of 16, behavior which we must assume is typical of the average British teenager. It is proof that "sex education is one of the devil’s cunning schemes we are warned about in the sixth chapter of the Ephesians"(p.310).
More than satanic schemes, "it is arguable that the explicit images of sex education are, in reality, part of a modern phallic cult that worships at the shrine of sexual gratification. The explicit images are designed to inflame the imagination, and make young men and women burn with lust"(p.263). Fortunately, Dr. Williams shows that we can fight these cultists with Christian virtues. "Christian sexual conduct is expressed in the four virtues—modesty, chivalry, chastity, and fidelity [....] these are the Christian virtues that guard children from danger and abuse—they provide children with God-given security, protecting them from the ravages that result from sexual immorality"(p.250).
As Dr. Williams says, "it is the responsibility of all parents, Christian and non-Christian alike, to teach their children a moral framework on which to base their lives, and this is especially true when it comes to sexual conduct"(p.307), which is why we need to dismantle existing sex education programs and go back to the days when the youth of Britain learned about sex from "Benny Hill" episodes and Viz comics.

With his biblical views on sex education, some may dismiss Dr. Williams as crazy. But he's crazy like a FOX. No, crazy like three foxes—on a meth binge—that have made a rudimentary catapult out of a fire extinguisher and some old tires that they’ll use to launch a family of snapping turtles duct-taped to a cinderblock as a distraction so that they can sneak in the back of a drugstore to steal cold medicine so they can make more meth.

August 1, 2009

Guilt is the Teacher, Love is the Lesson: A Book to Heal You, Heart and Soul by Joan Borysenko, PhD (Warner Books, 1990, ISBN 0-446-51465-9)

This book was written by: Joan Borysenko, PhD, a therapist who says that she "had sometimes used powerful mind/body techniques to permit me to do too much and run too fast [....] removing the fail-safe mechanisms that nature had provided"(p. 3). Without the fail-safe mechanisms, she got into a car accident where "my nose had been literally destroyed—opened like the hood of a car and nearly torn off my face—when my shoulder harness failed to catch"(p.2). Dr. Borysenko is also the author of Minding the Body, Mending the Mind, a reference source so valuable that it is cited on pages 11, 13, 55, 76, 99, 102, 131, 140, 174, and 178.

What is in this book: An examination of the healing power of guilt, an often misunderstood force that can move mountains and cause festering sores. Actually, herpes causes festering sores, but guilt can shape those sores into forms that are personally meaningful for us, as was the case with "Peter, a forty-five-year-old patient [...] with recurrent herpes lesions on the buttocks"(p.123). Peter was abused as a child in a strict and religious household, and "when Peter caught herpes as the result of an extramarital affair, his reasonable healthy guilt was overshadowed by unreasonable religious guilt [....] He was sure that the herpes was a punishment for his sins. And his body produced an amazing demonstration—breaking out in herpes lesions that mimicked the pattern of his original beatings, a recall of the original psychospiritual trauma"(p.124).

What is not in this book: New Age claptrap. "Enormous misconceptions and oversimplifications have arisen in New Age thinking,"(p.149) and ideas like the Law of Attraction are actually "a warmed-over version of Western spiritual pessimism"(p.150). This spiritual pessimism prevents us from learning valuable lessons by trying to heal our guilt. "To commit ourselves to healing our guilt is to seek, find, and celebrate our essential humanity in a world that too often seems to be a place of purposeless suffering"(p.6). Once we discover our true nature, we get to yell at retards. "I once had a Christian spiritual teacher who helped us understand humility through a conversation with a slightly retarded member of our congregation named Mike"(p.188). This teacher "turned" on Mike "with surprising force" and accused him of being full of himself. Then the teacher explained to Mike that "when you complain about not being smart, you are turning down your own unique, God-given place in the scheme of things, and that’s downright egotistical!"(p.188)

Would you recommend this book to a Jewish Mother? Yes, even though they already know that "shame is the master emotion" and that "shame is an adaptive, submissive state that favors survival but creates fear and helplessness"(p.67). This book can show them how to more effectively wield both guilt and shame, which they do out of love. (We’ll thank them for it later.)

Would you recommend this book to Lieutenant Marion "Cobra" Cobretti? No, he only wants to teach you that crime is a disease, and he is the cure.

What was interesting about this book? Dr. Borysenko’s in-depth examination of human nature caused me to re-examine some of my prejudices. I was particularly moved by her story of how "my husband, Myrin, and I had a dispute with our landlord and his wife, who seemed to distrust us on the basis of our long hair [....] The landlords told the judge that our pet guinea pig, 'Squeaky,' was part of a fictitious rabbit colony kept in the cellar by 'two crazy medical scientists' for experimental purposes!"(p.147)Not wanting to repeat the mistakes of Dr. Borysenko’s landlord, I have realized that it’s okay to trust women with long hair. I’m still wary of women with short hair, though. They look too dykey.

Special Award: Bitterly Books would like to present Dr. Borysenko with the Rachel Ray–Hannibal Lecter Fantasy Award for the Furtherance of Knowledge in the Fields of Sandwichcraft and/or Manslaughter for describing her vivid dream:

In the dream, my mother and I are floating on a raft in the deep end of a large swimming pool. I swim to the other end where several old women are gathered. One is in her nineties and is obviously a woman of great spiritual wisdom. I want to introduce her to my mother so she can share her wisdom with us so I excitedly swim back to the raft to tell my mother. By the time I get back to the wisdom woman, I find her lying close to death by the edge of the pool. Her chest has been opened and the meat carved off like the breast of a turkey. The other women in the pool are eating sandwiches of her meat. I am incensed, disappointed, and bewildered. "Why didn’t you open a can of tunafish?" I scream. "We prefer cold turkey sandwiches" is the terse answer.

(p.108)(Note: This award should not be considered as any type of endorsement, condonment, or approval from—and is not offered in collaboration with—either Rachel Ray or Hannibal Lecter.)